How to Get the Best Customer Service (Anywhere)

Shelves of books have been written about providing great customer support, but I haven't seen many written about how to get great customer support. Lance wrote a quick guide called "The 8 Keys to Successful Tickets" in May 2007, but because there have been over 730 blog posts between that post and this post, I thought I might take a shot at the topic again without stealing too many of his ideas. When you work with a service-based company, you're probably going to interact with customer support representatives regularly. During these interactions, your experience will not be defined by your question or the issue you have. Instead, it will be defined by how you present your issue.

It can be extremely frustrating when a server goes down or a script isn't working the way it should. When something like this happens, my gut reaction is to get upset and throw my keyboard. I've also noticed that when I am angry, I have a difficult time trying to explain my problem to technical support. I know I'm not alone in that regard, so I tried to pinpoint the most important points to remember when contacting customer support. While some of the explanations below are more SoftLayer-specific, each of the tips below can be used in any situation where you need customer support.

Remember there's a human on the other end. It doesn't matter where the customer support representative is; they're human, and their responsibility is to help you. I don't have any empirical data, but human nature tells me it's easier to be nice to someone who is nice to you. Once you realize there's a person on the other end of the phone trying to do his/her job, it's a little easier to thank them in advance for their help. It may seem insignificant, but if you thank me in advance for my help, I'll subconsciously work harder in an effort to deserve that gratitude.

Don't assume your request will be ignored. I'm surprised by the number of people who start or end their e-mail with, "No one will probably see this, but ..." or "Not that anyone cares, but ..." Don't assume that you'll be ignored. That assumption just creates overarching negative tone; it isn't a "reverse psychology" play. The support process can be defined by the expectations you set for it, so get started on the right foot and expect that your questions will be answered and issues will be resolved.

Don't start with a threat. "If you don't do this, I'm going to report this to my bank and other authorities," or "If you don't respond within 25 seconds, you'll be hearing from my lawyer." It's not uncommon to hear things like this in the first message in a ticket. It's much easier to help someone who seems easy to help. Invoking lawyers does not make your ticket seem easy to address. :-)

Provide useful, descriptive and relevant information. This tip can be tough since it's hard to understand what information is "relevant," but think about it before you send a support request. If you are having trouble logging in, then "I can't log in. Any ideas?" is not quite as clear as "Whenever I try to log in, the login screen just reloads without an error message. I know my username and password are correct. Any ideas? Thanks." That extra information will help considerably and will reduce the number of back-and-forth e-mails between you and the support representative.

Don't write overly detailed, wordy support requests. The longer your e-mail, the more difficult it is to read, diagnose and to respond. A representative has to read the entire ticket to find what's meaningful and figure out exactly what's wrong. Since they're trying to help you, you want to reduce their burden. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to help you. So, be clear, concise and brief. If you've got a couple different issues for support to look at, break them out into individual tickets. Different issues may need to be addressed by different departments, so multiple issues in a single ticket can lead to delays in responding to specific issues in the ticket.

More Tickets ≠ More Support. The flip-side of the above recommendation is that you shouldn't create multiple support tickets for a single issue. While it seems like you're drawing more attention to the issue and creating a sense of urgency, you're really slowing down the support process. Support representatives might be addressing the same issue in parallel or information might be lost between tickets, elongating the time to resolution.

Escalate your tickets smartly. If you think a ticket should be handled differently or if you would like a supervisor to look into a specific issue, you should always feel free to request escalation to a manager or a supervisor. The best way to make that request is to update your open ticket, initiate a live chat or place a call into the technical support phone line. If you aren't satisfied with your support experience, then we aren't either, so we want to hear from you.

As you can see, the prescription is not too complicated: Prepare yourself to receive the best support and help us provide the best support, and you're much more likely to receive it.